Fair Witness – by David Lykes Keenan

Photographer David Lykes Keenan splits time between Austin, Texas and Brooklyn, NY, and is working on a street photography book project called Fair Witness.

My photographs, at least the ones that I show to people, almost always include people. Pictures of most “things”, even lovely landscapes or seascapes, I find overwhelmingly boring. Rarely are these pictures of anything that I haven’t seen before.People pictures, on the other hand, are never the same. Things will always be, but people come and go, smile and frown, laugh and cry, love and hate, live and die. Things collect dust (I know, I have plenty) but people are life.

I watch people living their lives, doing mundane things that they, more often then not, are consciously unaware of. If I am on my game and have my camera ready then that otherwise lost moment is captured.

By now tens of thousands of such moments fill my negative archives and hard disks along with the occasional pictures of “things” that caught the fancy of my shutter finger. A very select few escape the archive and appear on my website or become a candidate for some other public viewing.

In late 2010, with the encouragement of Magnum Photos legend Eli Reed who is based in my home town of Austin, I decided it was time to leave my mark on the 21st century with a book of my street photography. Reed made sure I knew that my work was book-worthy and a candidate for exhibitions in galleries such as the notable Leica Gallery in NYC.

I am a ersatz Fair Witness to our times. Download the book proposal here.

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